The “Russian World” sense of identity has been heavily promoted by both Vladimir Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill over the past two decades. It asserts that there is a transnational Russian sphere or civilization, called Holy Russia, which includes Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, as well as ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people throughout the world. The ideology asserts that Moscow is the political center and Kyiv is the spiritual center. Russian is the common language and the Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate is the common religion. In this world, the Patriarch works in symphony with a common president/national leader (Putin) to govern this Russian world, as well as upholding a common distinctive spirituality, morality, and culture.
Against the corrupt and morally decadent liberal West, Putin promotes Russia as the Savior of Christian and conservative traditional values. In Putin's warped thinking, Ukraine's siding with the West is in fact a siding with Nazis (even though Zelenskiy is Jewish!) and Putin is needed to save Ukrainians from the morally decadent West.
Western Media is totally oblivious to what is going on because it has secularized, relativized, and trivialized its understanding of faith and theology. Therefore, the West has no idea how faith can be and is being weaponized. Whether it be Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Islamic State or Christian white nationalist terrorism, false usage of religion as an identity can exert a deadly hold. Western mainstream media, which rarely understands anything about religion, presents the world too often in Manichean terms that fail to see how modern holy wars are a product of and reaction against secularism itself.
The bottom line is that Putin's evil "holy war" violates the great teachings of true faith: peace, humility, mercy, forgiveness and he must be stopped.
Against the corrupt and morally decadent liberal West, Putin promotes Russia as the Savior of Christian and conservative traditional values. In Putin's warped thinking, Ukraine's siding with the West is in fact a siding with Nazis (even though Zelenskiy is Jewish!) and Putin is needed to save Ukrainians from the morally decadent West.
Western Media is totally oblivious to what is going on because it has secularized, relativized, and trivialized its understanding of faith and theology. Therefore, the West has no idea how faith can be and is being weaponized. Whether it be Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Islamic State or Christian white nationalist terrorism, false usage of religion as an identity can exert a deadly hold. Western mainstream media, which rarely understands anything about religion, presents the world too often in Manichean terms that fail to see how modern holy wars are a product of and reaction against secularism itself.
The bottom line is that Putin's evil "holy war" violates the great teachings of true faith: peace, humility, mercy, forgiveness and he must be stopped.